Marketing site rebuild for a property developer

The client had a property marketing site on a page builder that had accumulated about sixty plugins, took eleven seconds to load on mobile, and had started failing on the one thing that mattered commercially — the enquiry form. Their marketing team could edit pages themselves, which they were unwilling to give up, and that requirement was why nobody had rebuilt it. Enquiries were the whole point of the site; each project launch drove a spike of traffic and the site fell over on two of the last three.

Frontend developer on an agency retainer, effectively the only technical person on the account. I scoped it, built it, and handled the handover training.

I built the site — templates, the property listing structure, the enquiry flow and the image pipeline, which was where most of the performance was hiding. I owned the content model and the editor training, including a written guide for the two marketing staff who would maintain it. I also did the migration of about ninety existing pages, which was mostly manual because the old export was unusable. Redirect mapping was mine, and it is the part I checked three times.

I chose a static site with a hosted editing layer over another dynamic CMS, because the traffic pattern is spiky and flat files do not fall over during a launch. The trade-off is that publishing takes about ninety seconds instead of being instant, which I explained up front and which the marketing team accepted once they saw the launch-day behaviour. I kept the enquiry form posting to a small function rather than a third-party embed, so the submission is ours and a vendor outage cannot cost the client a lead. On images I moved everything to responsive sources generated at build, which is unglamorous and was worth more than every other change combined.

Fixed retainer budget, so scope discipline mattered more than usual and I said no to a virtual tour integration twice. The client's brand guidelines were strict and included a typeface with poor rendering at small sizes, which shaped the type scale. We also had to launch before a scheduled project announcement, so the redirect map and the enquiry flow got tested properly and a few second-tier pages went live rougher than I would have liked.

Mobile load went from about eleven seconds to under two on the same connection profile. The site handled the next launch spike — roughly nine times normal traffic — without degrading, which was the first time in three launches. Enquiry submissions rose about twenty-eight percent quarter on quarter, and while some of that is the launch itself, the form's own error rate went from a measurable share to effectively zero. The marketing team have published around forty pages since without calling us.

The agency's designer produced the page designs and adapted them when I flagged the type rendering issue. The client's marketing manager wrote all the content and sat through two training sessions. A copywriter on their side rewrote the enquiry form labels, which measurably helped completion.